Forearm tattoo of an ornate grey frame with teal gemstones around a teal oval reading Beauty from pain in black script.

Beauty from pain script in an ornate teal frame

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of an ornate, scrolled frame with a teal oval centre bearing the handwritten words Beauty from pain in black script. Teal gemstones sit around the oval and along the frame, which is shaded in grey with black outlines and dotted detail. The design fills the centre of the image against a dark background, with the skin photographed in soft focus.

Neo-trad Lettering Forearm Mirror Frame Gemstone Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame had come in on a Tuesday, wrapped in a feed sack, and Ada knew from the weight of it that someone had been paying for it in other ways for years. Gilt was flaking off the scrolls like pastry. Three of the paste stones had gone, leaving little sockets full of grey dust, and the glass in the centre was cracked from one corner nearly to the middle.

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"Can you have it done by Saturday?" the girl asked. She stood with her gloves balled in one fist, looking at the bench rather than at Ada, as if the bench might tell her something kinder.

Ada turned the mirror over. Someone had lettered words on the back in cream enamel, a careful copperplate that had outlived most of the hands that wrote it. Beauty from pain. Ada had seen that sort of sentiment stitched on a hundred samplers in her mother's parlour and had never once believed it, but the handwriting was good and the frame had been loved, which counted for more. She found teal glass in a drawer of broken brooches, a blue-green that matched the oval well enough once the lamp was on it. Bent over the bench with a loupe in her eye, she set the first stone and thought about how long a thing had to be handled before it looked like that.

On Saturday the girl came early. The scrolls were rebacked, the stones bright as sea glass, and the crack had vanished under a fresh pane. She tilted the mirror and studied her reflection for a long moment. "It doesn't look like it was ever broken," she said.

"Nothing comes back out of a drawer looking new, love," Ada said, and wrapped it in tissue paper.